Mrs. Dracula: Vampire Anthology

by Logan Keys

  Recorded and entered into the historical database of the Brotherhood

  May 21st, 1965.)

  ~

  -Uganda, 1893—

  I prefer the heat to the cold.

  Russia had been pleasant, in many ways. The war in the fifties had been lovely. So many bodies already bleeding. I could have stayed there forever, had the fighting lasted forever, but no; a semblance of peace had to come along to ruin my feeding playground. And then Alexander’s droll Emancipation Manifesto. That made things even harder. The gentry had always cared not if I fed on their slaves. If one was weak or injured or dishonorable, they were abandoned. After said abandonment, if they died, they died. And I was careful, ensuring I did not feed at the same estate more than twice. It was a smorgasbord of warm, earthy blood. I liked the way the serfs tasted, as if they had toiled so long outdoors that they smacked permanently of salt and growing things, like the plants and animals they tended each day were twined into their souls. It would make my insides feel nearly alive, drinking their blood. Their essence would pour into me and jumpstart my long-still heart, that organ I’d abandoned in more ways than one-not just the life of it gone, but the truth of it gone. That truth being love.

  I don’t love anymore. Not now.

  I will miss Russia.

  But now there is no war and no more slaves with their made-of-the-Earth bodies that melt against my mouth. I shiver, even now, at the thought of holding one of their forms against me, of leaning my head towards their necks, wrists, or inner thighs… of licking the salty deposits across their skins, left as a history of hours of sweating and hard labors. I shiver.

  Even now.

  I quite liked Alexander before the Manifesto. With one declaration, however, he’d spoiled my fondness.

  Stretching, I shift my body a little so that I am more comfortable in the tree in which I am perched. It is oddly-shaped, different than any I’ve seen before. It is like most of Africa-deformed, but in a captivating and intoxicating way. Its roots reach through the ground in all directions, surfacing here and there. Its limbs are thick and wide and reaching both towards the sky and away from it. There are other trees too, ones that look like singularly spaced giant legs, reaching up limbless ever higher until they become crowned with an array of parasol-like branches with leafy, elegant fingers. I love those trees the best I think.

  But they are not so easily perched upon.

  After the Manifesto, I left Alexander’s side and befriended Count Panin, with his 20,000 serfs, warm bed, and dull wife. He was charged with squashing any riotous behavior from the newly-freed slaves. So, in turn, I was charged with said squashing. And how glorious that was. To feed and feed and feed, quieting any unhappiness those newly-liberated men had was magical. I loved their pain, the feel of it inside my head as their blood pumped into my body. Usually, I stopped short of the kill.

  I was content for many years with Panin. There was even a brief time when he would allow me to kill, not just scare, large uprisings. It was killing for the sake of killing. It was lovely and crimson and left me feeling as if I were floating above the world, like a dirigible, that wonder of modern creation. I remember one village in particular.

  Bezdna.

  I’d sucked seventy peasants dry. Wounded and feasted upon a hundred more. A bounty for one such as me.

  Voices in the distance bring me back to myself.

  The language is one I do not speak, yet, it is one of my gifts to listen and learn with little effort. In only a matter of moments, I will get a feel for the words, the inflections, the accentuations, and then I will hear it and speak it as well as anyone born to the region. So I wait. I imbibe the knowledge. I stare at the older-looking woman approaching the tree that I am perched in. She is stunning, untamed, and wonderful. A band of gold circles around her forehead; the light kisses it, sending little sparks to light her deep brown eyes. She is laughing, throwing her head back in such a fashion that her necklace clinks against her skin, adding a metallic clank to the song of laughter and words that I am quickly beginning to understand. The young woman she is walking with does not share in the amusement.

  “Kuoa! Kuoa! Everyone wants me to marry! He is a wajinga boy! Stupid!”

  “Binti, calm yourself. Marriage isn’t mwisho. I did not upendo baba when we married. You will learn to love Mukisa.” The gold-crown woman croons to her daughter, as if her words are a cradle’s lullaby, trying to calm the anger of a newborn. I can already tell that there will be a marriage, that it is tradition. It is something that will come to pass because it must, because it has always been thus. I know that feeling, to be on the tail end of tradition and be the sacrificial lamb for the ‘because’. I feel my own belly spark with rage, at the memory rearing its ugly head.

  For a moment, I feel drawn back to the past, to my father negotiating my hand in marriage. Two centuries ago. So much has changed, yet so much remains the same. This girl, this daughter who is to be married against her will, cannot be more than fourteen.

  “Mukisa is a stupid boy,” the younger of the duo now passing directly beneath my tree spits out.

  Perhaps, my fate would have been very different had my father intended me to marry a boy instead of a man three times my age, older than my father even. But there was a debt to be settled, a price to pay to keep farming the land that had been ours for so many generations. Like this girl, I had yelled and raged and had been beaten into submission— not by kind words and assurances that love would follow, but with palm against face, fist against rib. Not so much that I would be damaged, but just enough to kill the fight within me. To quiet my storm-swirled spirit.

  I clench both hands so hard that my nails dig into my skin and I can feel blood begin to trickle from fresh wounds. I do not even bother to look at the damage I have caused. The marks will heal quickly, the blood will dry. I continue to press, continue to worry the cuts until I can feel ragged bits of skin like zippers on my palms. I want to kill the mother here, now. I want to save the girl from a marriage she’s not ready for, because I wish someone could have done that for me. Instead, I sink into memory and I let the mother and daughter pass, both unharmed. I choose my victims carefully nowadays, not like when I was first turned. My second husband had quite the full time job of covering my tracks during that blood beginning of rebirth into what I am now. I am more careful now, always to the end of staying unexposed. And, from this day onto eternity, my victims will no longer be servants, no longer innocents warped under the whips of immoral masters. It is a decision I came to on the crossing to this country.

  I will be different here.

  Life will be different here.

  I feel though, that I am silly to hold onto the hope of changing into something worthy and good. I am a creature of shadow and bloody desire, trapped within a body that will not die and that does not fundamentally change, despite how many times I force my bones to adjust and my figure to soften or harden. My outward appearance is only a layer over my core, which has rotten past the point of redemption. It is a rot that began many years ago, one that was birthed from a desire to survive.

  I was fifteen, finally a woman in the eyes of Mother Nature. It felt like a step towards the future, the day my bloods were upon me.

  And it was, but not in the direction I’d dreamed of as a young child. Not in the direction of Tomas, the boy I’d loved since I was old enough to walk and speak. No, my father had waited for that day and, unbeknownst to me, so had the owner of the land we farmed. The years had been lean, the ground unkind for growing, and my family was a breath away from losing everything. It was a miracle, my mother had said, that I was finally a woman on the eve of our destruction. The land owner did not want me, unless I was able to give him a child. And now I could. I was ready.

  My body was still shedding for the first time when he came to see my father. We’d seen one another before, but that time was different. He looked at me as a husband would. I looked at him as a prisoner would. He was tall and overbearing, dressed
in finery, but possessing the air of a man who’d not been born with a silver spoon. His hair was grayer than father’s, his face more wrinkled, his voice coarse-sounding. It was sanding block against weathered wood. There was nothing about him that redeemed him to me, nothing I found attractive in the slightest. Two weeks past my womanhood, he came again. The bruises my father had inflicted to stifle my rejection had healed. The fight in my soul was like a long-smoldering candle, unable to reignite. I went willingly with the land owner. A small bag of clothing was my only proof that I was anything at all.

  Proof that I was anything at all…

  My family was not at the ‘wedding’ which only consisted of a ‘man of God’ whose eyes tracked up and down my body more feverishly than that of my soon-to-be-husband’s, a fact that only seemed to energize my first husband’s lust, rather than quell it.

  Two of his servants had thrown small glasses of wine onto the crisp white bed linens after we’d been undressed and settled beneath the coverings. If I concentrate, I can still recall the heady scent and the dampness on my upper thighs, like a warning… a precursor of what was coming. He’d been rough, angling into me with all the deftness of a beached whale, his portly stomach pressing against mine with such force that I daren’t breathe for fear of breaking ribs. My mother had sent me with words of wisdom— just lie still and it’ll be over before you know it. So I’d submitted myself to it, trying not to squirm under the great weight of him, hoping it would be over quickly. But it wasn’t.

  He simply kept thrusting and pushing and heaving and breathing into my face the sickening scent of wine, tobacco and aged food bits caught between his teeth, which looked like they’d never been cared for, despite his status and funds. For what felt like an eternity— far past my breaking point when I could feel warm, sticky blood flowing from between my legs and my lower areas ached with a deep, throbbing pain— he pushed himself inside of me. Yet, he could not finish. He’d finally pulled out of me after a purgatory of personal submission. He’d staggered to his feet, his face contorted with rage, and he had taken out his failure on my body. With balled fists as hard and fierce as his manhood had been only moments before, until the blood seeping from my body came from so many places instead of just one, he beat at me.

  When I was properly black and blue, he’d stormed off, leaving me to nurse my injuries.

  We repeated the ineffectual relations followed by the abuse the next night.

  And the night after that.

  For so many nights.

  Until I’d run from him towards the fire, retrieved the cast iron poker, still red hot from his servant having stoked the flame, and I’d shoved it into his belly, into the fattest part of him. It had smelled of the oils in the night lamp. It had smelled of burning, noxious meat. He’d screamed and reached for me, but I’d released my hold on the poker and I’d turned from him, running out of the bedroom stark naked, save for a shift so thin it looked like it might dissolve in the slightest of rains.

  And that night, it had been raining. So hard that the tears on my face were a nothingness against the torrent.

  As I was a nothingness.

  One of his servants tried to stop me in the hall; I knocked him down with the force of my body. I’d read once that an object in motion meeting an object that is not in motion, will, given that the motionless object is of greater weight and stability, be stopped in its path. That wasn’t it exactly. The words had been more philosophical when I’d first read them; I can’t even recall what language I’d read them in, because my many years in-and-out of cultures had altered every memory I held. Honestly, now, I can’t even recall what my native tongue is, what my natural hair color is, what my father’s name was. Not that I’d want to recall the name of the man who’d sold me to my monstrous first husband.

  None of that matters now though. None of it.

  For I had been that object in motion.

  The servant was much larger than me. He had been the object of stillness.

  Yet I’d plowed through him with ease in my determination to be gone from the pain. It disproved that the size and weight of something determined victory. And that— that small realization that I was enough to conquer— grew inside of me like a persistent weed in an otherwise trim and proper garden.

  “Mukisa is a hard worker, Binti. He will make you a fine husband.” The mother and daughter duo is coming back my way; they each carry two jugs now and they walk carefully, so as not to spill whatever it is within the vessels.

  “I know, Mama,” the daughter sighs out, not struggling a bit with the heavy-looking jugs. She is a sturdy girl, built for hard living, with wide birthing hips and broad shoulders. She’ll taste like that, her skin a modicum thicker against my lips and the tiniest bit more difficult to puncture. I bet she is salty… My mouth fills with saliva at the thought. It has been so long since I’ve eaten. Only one meal on the entire journey from Russia has sustained me— he’d been a ship’s cook who’d beaten the cabin boy for not peeling all of the potatoes. I need to eat. It is not just a desire for pleasure now, for the aftershocks of sensation that shoot through my body to resonate in my groin. No, it has become an instinctual need, a necessity at this point, unless I wish to begin the hard, sickening descent into mummification.

  I stay in the tree until the mother and daughter duo is out of sight. As I alight from my perch, I concentrate on how I wish to appear. I feel the anti-euphoria crawl across my skin like I’ve fallen into a pit of tar and am desperately trying to claw my way outwards again; the tar slides in sticky waves down my skin. Changing is not pleasant. It is not easy. Yet, I must always do it. I become, shedding my guise of pale skin for a warmer tone smacking of cinnamon and honey. My dark, straight hair bends and twists, kinks and curls, until I wear a crown of tightly-woven strands. I do not have the adornment of the mother I have seen, no line of gold encircles my head, yet I know that if she sees me, she will call me kinsfolk.

  My clothing is wrong, however. I am still wearing the layers of Russia, like a second and third skin. I peel them away as I walk from the tree and towards the sounds of chatter, until nothing remains but my nakedness.

  This is another rebirth. Another newness. Another proof that I am not nothingness, but everything, hidden away inside the inconsequential shell of a body.

  Now, for my story.

  I must always have a story.

  There are still small unspoken struggles, remnants of the religious war. I am a child of that. Taken from my village. I am here now, from where? I know not. But I am alone, vulnerable, in need. I focus on my body, affecting yet another change, so that I am thinner. Emaciated. My ribs are an outline beneath stretched skin. My face is gaunt. My lips are cracked, weathered by the sun.

  My name.

  I must always have a new name.

  I search my mind, search the language I know now like I was born to it. After only a few sentences, a dozen words spoken, I am now a child of this speech. This is a gift I will never take for granted. So many gifts, both wanted and unwanted, have been granted me in this life.

  Namukasa. Goddess.

  That is what my second husband calls me. His goddess. We are still married, though we have not been on the same continent at the same time for more than fifty years. He will find me one day, when he decides that I am again worthy of his attentions. It is funny how, in life and love, you can go from goddess to burden in a heartbeat. I survive on that same principle.

  A heartbeat.

  To feel my victim’s pulse begin to wane and fade. It is my choice to extend their burden of living or deplete their life force completely.

  A heartbeat.

  I am walking slowly, leisurely, enjoying the way the dust swirls about my feet. Not that the terrain is dusty and dry here. The path I am on is merely well-traveled, the grass killed by the daily footsteps of those who have created their world here. The rest of this country, as far as the eye can see, is green. Stunning, jewel-hued green.

  I whirl at a sound I ha
ve never heard before. My eyelids separate, impossibly far apart, as I take in the glorious sight of an animal I’ve only ever seen in pictures. An elephant. It is yards away, walking towards me as if I pose no threat. Behind the first great beast is a second and a third, with a smaller fourth bringing up the rear. They are gray-scale magnificence against an azure sky. I have never seen a thing so wise-looking, as it walks on its great tree trunk legs. I stand frozen, unable to move, as the herd passes by me. The smallest, what I presume to be the baby, passes so close that I can touch it, but I daren’t.

  There are some like me, who would be as hungry as I am, that would resort to feeding on animals other than humans. I am not like them, though. There is no inherit evilness within the animal kingdom. Humans are different. Humans have the capacity for great evil and even greater good.

  So I feed on that evil. A Monster feeding on other monsters to feel less monstrous.

  It is what I have always craved, ever since I became what I am, and the memory of my first husband’s abuse became so vivid, so unforgettable, that it could not be ignored. Vlad warned me that would happen— that my most intense negative memories would take over my entire being for a short while. When the sensation waned, when I became enough of myself again, it was like my time as a human was ghosted into the background. I could remember what happened, but most of the details were gone. Except for the time from my first womanhood to the moment I killed my first husband. Imagine only having those full and unaltered memories to cling to? Imagine not remembering any beautiful details about your life… Imagine only remembering betrayal and pain…

  Of course, over time, as I gained control over my faculties and new abilities, I began to remember more and more. There were still missing pieces. I will always be an unfinished puzzle in that way, but I’ve moved past clinging to hair color and parentage.

  I wish I had chosen only terrible people to feed upon always, but that is not the case. I was insatiable and insensible when first turned, eating anything Vlad put in my path, and many he did not put there. Whilst in Russia, I had equated serfs with ‘lesser than’ and justified my feeding upon them. God, I’d found glory in it. I’d reveled in it. I’d basked among the upper echelon and drank blood like honey, bedding who pleased me and damning those who displeased me.